I've always felt naming a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike for Joyce Kilmer is like naming a whaling ship for Jacques Cousteau. But I guess, in New Jersey, there can be no higher form of praise. What poet wouldn't want to be alongside literary geniuses like Vince Lombardi?

I accept your acceptances, Doc and Anonymous. And I've always considered my nihilarian posts to be my most useful work.

But I can't understand all this fuss about discovering bosons, JP. I've discovered many bosons at work, most of them in upper levels of management.

For readers unfamiliar with the Higgs particle, it was apparently just discovered at the LHC, the world's second largest collider - after the New Jersey Turnpike.

Actually if you asked how many women have rest stops on the NJ turnpike named after them, the answer is indeterminate as Molly Pitcher may actually be a composite image inspired by the actions of a number of real women.

Is JP correct to say that SYZYGY scores 75 points with a treble word score in Scrabble.

If you look at the letter scores...S=1Y=4Z=10Y=4G=2Y=4

you might conclude that SYZYGY would score 25 and with a treble word score square included, that would yield a score of 25.

But how many Y tiles are there in a standard English Scrabble set? This is not a trick question. The answer is 2.

So to spell SYZYGY in Scrabble you would need to use a blank tile for one of the Y's, and the score would only be 21.

But all is not lost.

If you play SYZYGY on one of the treble word score squares in the center of a side of the board you might only score 63. But if you are lucky and smart you might also be able to include a double letter score in the word. And there are several places on the board where you can play it so that the Z is on a double letter score, which yields a grand total of 93.

It is also possible to play it with the S or the G or a Y on a double letter score, yielding 66, 69 or 75 respectively.

Tillerman has magnets on his integers? If the Laser class association ever finds out, he is SO busted.

This question always comes up, Puffin, whenever we discuss alphanumeric totals here and it's one I've often thought about. My algorithm maker has the week off, but I'll put him on it first thing when he gets back.

If I must refer to Wikipedia (which is always right) more than three times a day, it's officially time to quit commenting when I'm obviously out-educated regarding the vocabulary with which these comments have been written.

'scuse me Dog, but I do not bow to the false god of wikipedia. That is not where anyone should go for expertise. In particular I question not the definition but the "sometimes called" bit. I'll bet not one damned person in recent history has called 69 an odious number.

To test my theory I went to Youtube (I know where to get the goods) and looked up 69 to find people talking about it. Found several videos no problem..."odious" was not heard even once.

Puffin, you're probably right that no normal person has called 69 odious.

It's only mathematicians who do.

And actually, it's not 69 they think of as odious, but 1000101, which is how mathematicians do 69.

You can see right off that they don't do 69 the same way that everyone else does, This is probably because they spend too much time alone in their rooms until they start to smell funny and then no one wants to do 69 with them.

The image that dappled conjures for me in the 59th Street Bridge Run is of walking in sunlight under trees, or perhaps having that same happy feeling that doing so creates. It is morning but the author is sleepy (up all night perhaps?)

Either that or it's a drug reference. Most metaphors in 60s songs were drug references.

By the way, the lyrics are, "I'm dappled and drowsy..." not "My mind is dappled..."

I first confronted the word, head on, in a college English class where we read this Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, which, by the way, is not a bad example of another kind of syzygy.

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things--For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

We went to BEYC. There was kayaking and whalering and snorkeling and SUPing. There was lots of sailing in all sorts of little boats and some big boats. I won some races. We saw Rising Sun and the rising moon. There was wearing of Hawaiian shirts. There was rum.

Where is O Dock?

For the literal minded, O Dock is in Berkeley, California, where I keep an old Catalina 30, but O Dock is really more a state of mind. It's where a part of me lives whenever I can't actually be sailing.